The Met Office launched a major upgrade to its weather forecasting system on 9 February 2026, bringing improved, higher-resolution forecasting that will benefit residents in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. The upgrade is designed to provide better early warnings for heavy rain, strong winds, fog and flood risk, helping the community plan journeys and protect their homes.
The upgrade runs on a cloud-based supercomputing platform hosted on Microsoft Azure in partnership with Microsoft. The new system delivers around 60 petaflops of compute and, with planned capacity upgrades, could provide many times more processing power than earlier systems. It also enables high-resolution forecasts at around a 2-kilometre deterministic grid, allowing forecasters to focus on much smaller areas to identify where rain or fog is likely to form.
This change is particularly important for the town centre, where the River Leam has a history of causing flooding problems. Official flood-warning areas for the River Leam at Leamington include Mill Gardens, the Royal Pump Rooms and Pump Rooms Gardens, and parts of Dormer Place and Riverside. Better rainfall prediction and higher-resolution guidance should help local teams prepare for rising water levels near the Royal Pump Rooms and Jephson Gardens more effectively.
The upgrade also enables extended local forecasting out to around 14 days, giving families, businesses and local authorities more time to prepare for storms or disruptive weather. The Met Office says the new system will make forecasts more realistic — showing rain and snow in ways that more closely reflect what people actually see outside.
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